


neither to arrive or to escape

by leah k (blinkiesays)



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: M/M, Pre-Rogue One
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 12:58:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9441299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blinkiesays/pseuds/leah%20k
Summary: Just because Baze doesn't listen to the Force, that does not mean he doesn't hear it.





	

Just because Baze doesn't listen to the Force, that does not mean he doesn't hear it.

There is a woman in the marketplace, one that Baze has not seen before.  The Force guides Baze's eyes to her as she haggles with a fruit seller, her birdlike voice rising above the beaten-down murmurs of the crowd.  The Force tells him she is dangerous, though her reed-like body appears to be weak, malnourished and frail, like so many others in the square.  In this she is the same as Chirrut: a weapon left unsheathed in the sunlight, easily overlooked.

Though she does not turn her head, the woman is watching a man, just behind her, that Baze knows: one of Saw's men, a smuggler who turned his skills to the rebellion for protection against those he had wronged.  There is a bounty set against this man, high enough that Baze himself was tempted.

Usually, it is Chirrut's place to meddle in the affairs of others while Baze watches from the shadows, finger resting on the trigger.  But today had once been a holy day and Chirrut has gone to the shadow of the fallen temple to lose himself in meditation and in prayer.  And so today it is Baze that moves, without the burden of undue thought, to the woman's side.

The few spare glimpses of the woman's face that peek through the folds of her robes are rough and scarred, but her skin is soft when Baze touches the back of her hand, stilling it against the grip of her blaster.  The softness is a shock; her skin does not know the desert, the way the air itself steals the water from your breath.

The woman's hand turns in his, grasping his wrist and digging clawed fingertips into the exposed flesh of his arm.  "Who are you?" she asks, her voice dropping from birdsong to a hiss, a warning. Perhaps she thinks that Baze is competition?  He's been mistaken for a bounty hunter before.

"This is not the place," Baze says, in a voice that does not carry further than it needs to.  "They are watching."

There are Imperial agents here, disguised as merchants and beggars and thieves.  Invisible to most, but those who know how to look see them clearly for what they are.  Chirrut would say that the Force moves around them darkly; Baze just knows that they are too clean for this place.

The Empire, too, would like Saw's man. They will not hesitate to strike down anyone in their way, and they certainly have no love of bounty hunters. Why pay for what they can easily take by force?

Chirrut would know the words to reassure this woman that he is a friend, but Baze finds them out of reach.  He only knows what the Force would have him know: it is not done with her, yet.  "This is not where you want to die," he says, and he sees in her eyes his shot has fallen short of the mark.

The woman's hold on him tightens, the pinprick tips of her claws drawing blood.

Baze stands relieved the burden of proving his good intentions soon enough, words rendered unnecessary: the usual sounds of the market quiet, replaced with unmistakable clanking of stormtrooper armor, the low grind of an approaching tank.

The wary look in the woman's eyes eases to one of understanding and fear.  Her grip on his arm loosens.  In one breath she loudly curses the fruitseller for his exorbitant prices, and in another she whispers to Baze, "Is there another way out of here?'

"Come," Baze says, and leads her out of the center of the market and down an alleyway, through a doorway, into the low-ceilinged cantina that Chirrut hates.  It's too dark, Chirrut says, always, though he isn't speaking of the low red-tinted lamps, the lack of windows.  He means the people, and he is right.  Baze's presence here draws no attention, but Chirrut's purpose shines too brightly for this place.

Inside, the heavy wooden door shut behind them, the sounds of the square are quieter, but still distinct.  Through the mud walls shouts can be heard, the clatter of stalls upturned, the hiss and whir of blaster fire.  Baze knows how this story ends: Saw's man dragged out into the center of the market and shot in the head, as an example.  He's seen it before.

"Well, I for one am not going to question why you did that," the woman says.  "But thank you."  The warning is gone from her voice, replaced now with gratitude and no small amount of confusion.

Chirrut would tell her to turn her thanks to the Force; Baze only nods.

"I could use a drink," she says.  As she moves towards the bar, she unwraps long strips of fabric from around her head, revealing a thin, sharp face framing big dark eyes.  Her hair is almost twice as long as Baze's own, though better kept, and it falls in waves down her back when she shakes loose its bindings.

"Would you like anything?" she asks. Baze shrugs, non-committal.  "I'll pay."  Baze raises an eyebrow at her, questioning.  She laughs.  "I got paid half in advance, I'm not stupid.  And they wanted him dead or alive.  Everyone's happy all around, I'd wager.  Well.  Almost everyone."

Baze sits down at the bar at her side, and accepts a drink.  He listens to her for a while as she tells the bartender wild stories and he stores up the small interesting things he learns, to tell Chirrut when he gets back home.  He wants to tell Chirrut about the way the red light in the bar makes the green scales on her neck look black, like droplets of spilled ink.  He wants to describe to Chirrut the damp smell that clings to her hair where it's coiled in gaudy loops around her shoulders.

The woman finishes her drink just as the light starts to bleed from the sky.  She stands, turning to Baze directly.  "I have a ship," she says, an intent look in her dark eyes.  "It's a rusting out piece of junk that isn't much to look at and flies like a wounded mynock." She flits her hand in the air in an unsteady, wobbling rhythm.  "But it  _ does _ fly.  You should come with me, leave this awful place."

Baze thinks of how he'll describe this moment to Chirrut, who has never seen a mynock, wounded or not.  

"No," he says, easily.

"Alright, alright," she says, hands up as if in surrender.  "I won't  _ make _ you.  This is your home, I understand."

Baze lifts a shoulder, makes another non-committal noise.  He doesn't think of Jedha so much as home as something that happened to him, once.  If he had any sense, he'd be somewhere that paid better, but instead of sense, he's got lungs full of sand and holes in his last pair of boots.  Still, he has his reasons.

The woman leaves, hiding her face once more, and she leaves Baze's pockets heavier with the weight of new credits.  Chirrut wouldn't have accepted them, but Baze knows you can't go on begging in the streets when no one else has any money.  They cannot live on Chirrut's principles.

Baze orders another ale and when his glass is empty, walks to the dark side of the temple and climbs the ramparts.  From there, he can watch the unsteady trail of light the thrusters of a ship paint against the deepening sky.

When he climbs back down, Chirrut is waiting for him at the base of a crumbling staircase.  Even now, after these many years the sight of him in starlight makes Baze's heart race, his breath come short.

"She was pretty," Chirrut says.

Baze snorts. Even now, after these many years, he's adept at ruining a moment.

"How would you know?" Baze asks.

Chirrut's mouth turns up into a knowing smirk.

"I see many things, through the Force."

_ And yet you would waste your sight on me, _ Baze thinks.

They walk, strides matched in length from habit, from long familiarity, from routine and repetition, all of these together.  They move silently along a circuitous route that slips them past Imperial guard patrols enforcing curfew, down the long rows of shuttered windows and shut-tight doors where families huddle together against the dry, cold night.

Inside their own locked door, with the lamp lit only for Baze's comfort, he unholsters his blaster and sets it aside.  His shoulders ache from the weight, the muscles in his back, his spine.  He bought the repeater on a trading post in deep space; it is heavier on Jedha.

Baze asks, "What if next time I get a better offer?"

"I expect you to use your best judgement."

"You are my best judgement," Baze says.  To say anything else, Chirrut would know it for a lie.

Chirrut holds his hands up, empty, offering nothing.

Baze has seen other worlds, even if Chirrut has not.  There are places he could go where life would be, if not good, then easier.  Here, the mines are empty.  Here, the temple is only a hollowed shell surrounding a rotted core.  Here, they are running against the wind, staying in place but only just.  The ground will start slipping beneath their feet soon.

To stay, Baze will have to find work, eventually.  The Empire isn't so above the mess down on the planet that they don't need things, sometimes.   Chirrut believes that the Force will provide, but Baze doesn't need the Force to see the future.  If he won't take the Empire's money, first they're going to be hungry, and then they're going to be dead.

Baze turns out the lamp, and Chirrut's arms find him, pull him down into a slow, familiar kiss.  His skin holds the last warmth left from today's sun and the lingering scent of the temple, fragrant oils and incense.  The old ways still live in the shadows of this city, and so long as they do, Chirrut will live here as well.  It is where the Force wishes him to be, and so he remains.

Baze knows Chirrut will not ask him to stay, as Chirrut knows he does not have to.

Baze undresses to lie down in the tangle of sweat-sour sheets that passes for their bed, spare of comforts but luxurious compared to their long-ago quarters, where Baze would sneak past the old monks to spend his nights in Chirrut's tiny cot.  He'd hardly noticed the discomfort as a young man, so driven he was by the need to be close to Chirrut, to lie awake counting the beats of Chirrut's heart against the thin skin of his wrist.  He'd been so often consumed by the fear that he might love Chirrut less as they grew older, that the flame lit in his soul would consume all of him at once and exhaust itself.

If they had been young and foolish, then, what were they now?  Old and stubborn men set in their ways. He should have been terrified instead of what did come to pass: that his love would not diminish, that instead it would remain the one true and unchanging thing at the heart of him while life wore away the rest, like wind and sand tearing at stone walls.

"You think much too loudly," Chirrut says, his voice chiding and irreverent, pulling Baze's attention to the present moment, to him.  His own robes and weapons laid aside, he joins Baze, his body warm as banked coals along Baze's side.

"I was thinking of you," Baze says.  In the dark, it is easier to be honest.  Maybe that is why Chirrut is honest all the time.

"Oh," Chirrut says.  "In that case, carry on."

Baze does not say,  _ I was thinking that you are a stubborn old fool. _  Instead he asks, "Do you want to hear about the woman, or not?"

Chirrut settles against his side, close, a habit formed when they were two near-grown men struggling to share a space meant for one.  For all that has changed, this has not: Chirrut's breath stirring the hair on Baze's neck, Chirrut's ear resting against Baze's heart, Chirrut's fingertips just touching Baze's ribcage.

"So she  _ was _ pretty," Chirrut says.

"Not enough."

Baze tells Chirrut of the market, and the bounty hunter, and how a mynock flies.  Chirrut says back silly things about the Force providing the ugly as well as the beautiful; his jokes are terrible, as always, and as always he makes Baze wish he was the kind of man who laughed more.  When they run out of things to say, the room fills instead with the noises of night birds and Imperial patrols and the soft deep exhales of Chirrut's sleeping breaths.

They are never really safe, not since the Empire first cast its long shadow over their city, but in this moment they are as close as they can be.  And so Baze drifts to sleep the same way he has for almost as long as he can remember: counting the spaces between the beats of Chirrut's heart, grateful. 

**Author's Note:**

> What is love then, but to drag a dead deer  
> By its horns, from the passing lane  
> Just to drive on, neither to arrive or to escape  
> Not to save someone
> 
> \- "[You Belong](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLBWnPW-ABQ)" by The Avener featuring Laura Gibson


End file.
